For A’s and Giants, trade deadline a sad and boring affair

Oakland Athletics pitcher Sonny Gray works against the Miami Marlins in the first inning of a baseball game Wednesday, May 24, 2017, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

Oakland Athletics pitcher Sonny Gray works against the Miami...

Turns out, the trade deadline day was just like the rest of the local baseball season.

A little sad. A lot of boring. Not much to feel optimistic about.

As expected, the A’s traded their onetime “star to build around,” Sonny Gray. Gray, 27, leaves the team still looking about 15 years old, headed to the Yankees, where he will step into the pennant race.

As not expected, the woeful Giants did absolutely nothing on deadline day. They didn’t move any of their pieces, got nothing new, and gave fans pretty much zero reason to look forward to their remaining 55 games. Unless you have a dusty Panda hat in your closet that you’d like to wear one last time.

The departure of Gray shows again that the reward for wearing the green-and-gold is that you, too, will join a playoff-bound team while still in your prime. Just not in Oakland.

Oh, things are going to be different for the A’s now, right? That’s what we’ve been told. The A’s are building for the future. They’re going to hold on to their talent, sign players to long-term deals, build a stadium somewhere, behave like a real baseball team.

Yeah, yeah. We’ll check back in 2019.

Meanwhile, whatever kind of future the A’s have, it won’t include right-hander Gray, who was the next big thing back in 2013. Gray was drafted in the first round in 2011 (18th overall) and made his big-league debut two years later. That season he pitched in the American League Division Series, taking a loss in the deciding Game 5 against Detroit’s Justin Verlander.

It was a disappointment for the A’s, but back on that day, we all felt sure that we’d see Gray in the playoffs again.

Now it looks like we will. In pinstripes this October.

Considered the team’s best big-game starter, he pitched the game that clinched the wild card in 2014. But in that one-game playoff with Kansas City, rent-a-pitcher Jon Lester got the start and was bad. The A’s lost. The team was torn apart, a process that was completed Monday.

Oh, what might have been.

At the very least, A’s fans might have expected a good haul for the most recent departure. Gray is still affordable and under team control until 2019. Nobody knows what will happen in the future, but two of the prospects received in return are on the shelf with season-ending injuries.

Outfielder Dustin Fowler, 22, was drafted in 2013 by the Yankees. He made his major-league debut in June but ruptured his right patellar tendon in that outing. Right-hander James Kaprielian, 23, was drafted in 2015 out of UCLA. He’s made six starts but hasn’t pitched this year after having Tommy John surgery in the spring. Neither injury is career-ending, but both are concerning.

The third prospect, middle infielder/outfielder Jorge Mateo, 22, may be the best of the bunch. He came to the Yankees as an international free agent when he was 16. He started the season in Class A and was promoted to Double-A in June, where he hit .300 in 30 games. He has excellent speed.

The prospects are all considered good, but it’s a high-risk trade when it involves two injured prospects. And it is certainly not the kind of haul that was making its way through the rumor mill in recent weeks. The Yankees prospects that were being talked about — infielder Gleyber Torres (ranked No. 3 on MLB.com’s prospects list), Clint Frazier (ranked 27th) and Estevan Florial (ranked 90th) — all proved to be untouchable. Which is not unexpected.

Now the longest-tenured Athletic is Marcus Semien, who played his first game in April 2015.

The A’s continue to send away their players who have value.

The aging and disastrous Giants, meanwhile, apparently didn’t have players with enough trade value to get anything back in return. So they stood pat with their forgettable team.